RE: VIRTUE ETHICS
I read it and the essence is that it places less emphasis on which rules people should follow and instead focus on helping people develop good character traits, such as kindness and generosity.
But that does not answer the following questions :
1) Given that there is no God, WHY are we bound to be kind and generous and why are the above traits any “better” or “worse” than NOT being kind and NOT being generous ?
2) If people decide NOT to be kind and generous, what rule in the universe (given that we simply are the accidental results of a collision of atoms), tells us that these people are bad or evil ?
3) If someone decides NOT to practice virtue ethics, does that make him a bad person ? Who says so and by what authority ?
The essay I referred you to made no comment with regard to the existence or non-existence of God. The good news is that people seem capable of discussing moral issues and coming to some rather strong agreements without having to agree on their positions with regard to God.
God exists, and that fact is very important, and ultimately figures in as the most important component of morality. But it seems that God created the world in such a way that lots of people of good will of varying faiths and lack thereof can come to common agreement from just what they witness in the world and in the behavior of their fellow human beings. And this common agreement seems in many cases to jibe with Christian morality and theology.
The problem with requiring everyone to agree in whole (or in great detail) with your own beliefs regarding God, is that you have a whole lot of stuff to prove before you even get around to saying whether it is right or wrong for X to do Y. You have to fully describe the nature of your God. You need to provide proofs of His existence, and that He exists as you believe. You then need to show that God defines morality, and that it is not the other way around, whereby God does what is moral. All of these are very contentious areas of philosophical discussion which would require multiple tomes to work out in sufficient detail. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica is only one such example.
Why not try to meet people half-way? Why not try to engage them on the moral questions alone, especially if there is common agreement on lots of things? Most people have no clue how their cars work and yet they are able to drive them quite adequately. Just because lots of people don't understand where their moral values come from, doesn't mean they can't come up with a decent set of moral values and make reasonable attempts to live by them.
"2) If people decide NOT to be kind and generous, what rule in the universe (given that we simply are the accidental results of a collision of atoms), tells us that these people are bad or evil ?"
There appear to be physical laws that govern matter and energy in the universe. Why can't there be laws that govern the behavior of human beings? Atheists have convinced themselves that there is a way for physical laws to just appear out of nothing and they are quite happy to live by these laws without knowing exactly where they came from. Deontologists have a similar view of morality: they are certain that there is a moral code that is discoverable through reasoning and intution, but they can't identify a source.
Christians and atheists can work together to build a bridge even though they have different beliefs about why F=ma. Similarly, Christians, Deontologists, Virtue Ethicists, and Utilitarians can work together to create societies. These societies are based on laws, which in turn are based on moral beliefs, that can be similar even if the different groups have different ideas about where the beliefs come from.
3) If someone decides NOT to practice virtue ethics, does that make him a bad person ? Who says so and by what authority ?
There is "philosophy of science" and then there is science. Scientists use certain methods to gather data and confirm theories. The "philosophers of science" analyze the methods to see if they are indeed good ways to go about validating theories. A lot of philosophy went into developing set theory, which is a major underpinning of mathematics, which is the universal language of science. Scientists may think that philosophers are a bunch of over-intellectualized layabouts wasting their time on unanswerable questions, but science wouldn't be as rigorous and useful as it is without the input of all of the philosophy that went before.
Similarly moral philosophy is the underpinning of political philosophy and the actual practical workings of politics. The people who tell so-and-so that he is wrong for doing such-and-such are the police and the courts and the populace that has put those people in office.
If a good philosophical case can be made against a specific practice, then that will be put into law, and people that do that will be suitably punished either through the law or through public denegration.
Those of us who believe in an afterlife believe that rewards and punishments can be infinite. Those who don't believe in and afterlife believe that rewards and punishments can only be finite. Regardless of this difference we can both agree that the same sets of behaviors either need to be rewarded or need to be punished.
So we haven't convinced the majority of "secular humanists" that abortion is an abomination. We have helped people see that slavery is wrong, that racism is wrong, that sexism is wrong, that radical feminism is wrong, etc.
We either need to live with those that God has chosen to place around us and come to some acceptable level of working truce, or we must move into the hinterlands and wait for the collapse of society and the return of The Remnant.
Of course we could remain physically among the unbelievers and close our ears and shout "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!" at the tops of our lungs hoping that that might work to convert the unbelievers. That in my mind is just an intellectual form of withdrawal no different than hiking to the top of a remote mountain peak and waiting for the radiation to drop down to survivable levels.